There are essays online about literary and book clubs that have floundered, to the dismay of those who tried to establish one. The groups that do flourish may seem rare, but I’ve a few things for you to try before you give up the effort. Anyway, what you see online isn’t the full or even partial picture of what is working out there. Take heart, it can be done!

I recommend you pray every step, especially the preliminary steps. Ask God for another woman to partner with you in establishing it. A faithful and well-read woman; or a woman who wants to one day be well-read. Pray about people you already know will constitute a strong nucleus that will be faithful in the first couple of years. The four of us who began literary were committed no matter what; the rest of the ladies joined us one by one.

​Pray about the first three or four books (three or four months) you will read. We were melded together with the first two books we chose: Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Bronte’s Jane Eyre. There can’t be two books more different. Discussions inevitably came to comparing and contrasting the two: setting, milieu, tone, characters, conflict. We still refer to those two books after all these years. Austen’s works always set a standard of excellence; if you use her in the first year, you can’t go wrong. Her sentences are perfect; her humor layered and intelligent; her insights into character a marvel. But her outright descriptions of early nineteenth century British middle-class culture are so parsimonious that the reader must pay more attention to the characters’ actions and listen more closely to their conversations to understand the nuances and long-forgotten standards of that day. Austen invites you to work at seeing, to read again and again. It’s really a delight!

Don’t be promiscuous with your invitations. Be particular. We once had a lovely woman who had grown up lonely, in an orphanage in South America because her parents were missionaries on that continent, and that’s what they did with their children in those days. She was a serious reader, and probably the only truly erudite woman I have ever known.

During that time, we read Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s exposé of New York City’s upper-crust during the Gilded Age. For everyone in that society, strict codes of behavior were adhered to even if a lifetime of self-denial ensued. Countess Olenska has fled her husband and returned to her New York family, a family at the very pinnacle of the finest in that age and place. But she’s too loose for their comfort; just her presence threatens the family’s pristine reputation. Therefore, she must forthwith be sent back to Europe and her aristocratic husband!Predictably, she slides into an almost-consumated affair with her cousin’s financé, so she’s now a definite liability. What society approved of in Europe’s aristocratic courts certainly wasn’t done, openly at least, in New York cultured society.

Now remember, Ruth Anne had grown up in an orphanage which was not even in her native country. Like Olenska -- and here the similarity ends -- she knew she was without a real ‘home,’ that she was without roots. When we met to discuss the book, she spoke for the Olenskas of the world. People who need to come home, who need psychological support, but who are instead brutally rejected and sent packing because of what their society expects of them and their family’s unwillingness to come alongside to redeem a life.​In our discussion that night, Ruth Anne peeled away my shallow literary analysis. She helped me see loneliness and alone-ness. There is no real way to change that condition, outside and apart from Jesus Christ Himself and the body of Christ. But this book wasn’t written by a believer, so this hope isn’t available for Wharton’s Countess Olenska, or any of the characters in that book.

When I later taught Age of Innocence in a classical high school classroom, the students learned how to do a real-life analysis along with the typical literary analysis. Indirectly Ruth Anne enabled them to “see” what that abjectly-alone character brought to the conflicts in the book and that there are real people like her all around them. I’m indebted to her and the entire literary club for the insights brought to life that evening.

This is just one example of a literary pivot point, an unexpected awareness that one unique person can bring to literary discussions.

Pray about where your literary ‘home’ will be. The first ten to twelve years or so we met at restaurants, many chosen to “match” the book. But as time went by, several things happened to change that practice. We tended to stay too long; our frustrated waiters were always wanting to turn their tables but unfortunately we were sometimes oblivious, so deep were we in our discussions. The lighting wasn’t enough, because of course we were all getting older! And the expenses added up.

So, we began to meet in our homes, which is a very lovely thing. Since there have invariably been caterers and unbelievably gifted cooks among us, the food and wine has been simply luscious! The evening is not only good books along with serious analysis, but great food and beautiful Christian fellowship centered on a great piece of world-renown literature: its conflicts, heroes and anti-heroes, and themes.

Pray about how the discussions will be facilitated. Our group doesn’t really have an established leader any more. It just happens that someone gets us started – as soon as possible. But when you are in the early stages of the club, it’s best if there are two or three of you who knowingly (but casually) take responsibility for the evening: getting it started, posing questions should discussion lag, and then managing the tapering off as the evening ends.Remember this: always always small talk is the kiss of death! If the girls want to chat, agree to come early. The real purpose for gathering is literary discussion. Make this clear at the beginning. Everything is easier that way.

Establish a meeting date and don’t change it. We meet the last Tuesday evening of the month. It’s now pulsating through our veins as a day set apart from all others. Undoubtedly, when I’ve Alzheimer’s, it will still be there! An established calendar date and place actually works. It’s too frustrating to set and then reset dates, especially when young mothers have kids at home and they’ve engaged their husbands or a sitter so they can have the evening free. Even though several may have to miss an evening, don’t try to accommodate by changing the date. We’ve had club discussions with just three of us and it worked fine.

I’m so excited at the thought that some of you will begin your own literary club. You will love it! And you will love the variety of literary gifts you encounter as you read civilization’s classic authors … and how God has shaped the minds and perspectives of the women you see on literary night.

Up Next: Part Three: Personal Benefits of Participating in Literary Discussions

It could be a flight to Paris, the first grandchild, a sunny spot in your garden. For me, it’s my literary club. Not book club mind you, … there’s a world of differences.

Literary groups are characterized by a commitment to the world’s classics; my club especially is marked by its anglophile-ish tastes, although our younger women welcome modernity’s literature from non-European countries quite well thank you. This Literary Club for Christian Women of Letters was established in March of 1990. There were four of us founders in whose lives much has transpired since that day we sat at Funky’s eating baked potato soup and dreaming aloud of sharing great reads together.

Elizabeth’s perspectives have always come from a deep well of love for the Lord, His people, and His ways; she helps us appreciate real life with and without the Lord that’s inadvertently presented in great novels. Jenny has homeschooled all thirteen years of her four kids’ educational experience, so she is knowledgeable about a wide range of things that add invaluably to our conversations. Karen, a true literary analysist, has since been a missionary in Africa and returned back to us. And I, not really a deep thinker but a woman with huge opinions, have taught literature and humanities at a classical school, taking much insight from our literary discussions with me into the classroom.

We are committed and stalwart pillars of an ongoing literary effort. We schedule ‘literary’ before we add the rest of life to our calendars.

And as the years flew by, God brought rich-minded women to walk this grand imaginative road with us. We are young, middle-aged, and older women who delight in opening the cover of a good book so we can analyze and discuss, disagree and debate, and stand in awe as the same author speaks to each of us right into the heart of our literary imaginations.

What constitutes a good group? I recommend you make it a literary pursuit. Typically, book clubs like to read best-selling authors or reads written for the masses. You know those lists, they’re commonly found in USA Today.

But literary clubs are different. We are committed to literature that nations offer as their very best. We only wish our own lives could be longer.

England’s Austen and Shakespeare and Dickens, as well as Wilde, Ishiguro, Goldsmith, Fielding and Lewis always leave us wanting more … another read-through or another English book. Sir Walter Scott wrote historical novels that grow such an honorable love of country and one’s history that I’m thanking God for his continued popularity. Scotland produced the great Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Gothic mysteries, psychological character studies, historical adventures and romances. France gave us Stendhal, Flaubert, Hugo, de Balzac, and Dumas. Germany lent Kafka, Goethe, Remarque. I think the cultured world has read Russia’s greatest – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and Pasternak – with a breaking heart. The joy and suffering of the Russian people is too much for a regular diet; they must be read only every now and then. South Africa’s Cry the Beloved Country by Patton will lift the souls of future readers with hope and love and beauty. I hope I’ll hear insights about that book until I die. Spain adores her Cervantes; Italy her Dante, Eco, and Calvino. And we adore Norway’s Sigrid Undset, since we read the Kristen Lavransdatter series once and then twice more. A few years later, we capitulated willingly to the lure of her Master of Hestviken tetralogy. Undset’s works show us Norway of the 1100s, the very century when the light of Christianity finally began to penetrate the great Viking darkness. We barely walked into Japan before we wept over Endo’s Silence, now a visually lacerating motion picture. We marveled over the creativity of India’s Salmon Rushdie and his fantastical realism.

Then there’s America. How does one only mention three or five or even twenty-five books from this place? We’re unique, for our culture and character are so new, so gregarious and so confident. It would demand an entire blog entry to address American literary giants.I wonder if our literary club can ever scratch beyond the surface of all this wonderful literary heritage from the nations. Though we have been reading together for twenty-seven years, twelve months a year, we have only barely begun.

You may ask: where do you find these wonders? The great classics occupy musty shelves in our public libraries, and the digitals of our computers and smart phones. You can pick them up for a few dollars at used book stores, and even in antique stores and flea markets.

You may also ask: how do we squeeze them into our lives? We women can do almost everything with a book on hand … walk the Pacific Coast Trail, hike mountains and trudge deserts. Or rock a baby, weed the garden, and even bake a loaf of bread. One of our gals leaves her book for that month’s discussion on the kitchen counter all day … open. A grabbed five or ten minutes can add up to quite a few pages. Books fit into back packs and purses, diaper bags, glove compartments, and flat little Kindles. Sometimes they’re lamentably lost under the couch or left in a locker over the holidays.

But always these authors and their portrayals of human nature hide in the recesses of our minds, latent until they occasionally shout into our own life stories.

‘Tis surely the best of the best of things: to read, think, write, discuss, and read again.O the glories of being human. The bliss of very very good books. And girlfriends to share them with.

Part Two: Establishing a Literary ClubPart Three: Personal Benefits of Participating in a Literary Club

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Cornel Warren, Managing Editor of Live with Heart & Soul, shares her heart as she reaches Christian women with timeless, beautiful content to encourage and inspire their walks with God, themselves and those around them.

Taylor Tinnin, Contributing Writer at Live with Heart & Soul, celebrates the success of real-life Christian women who are walking out God's calling on their lives. She also writes inspirational articles that draw our eyes back to the Creator.

Patty Morwood, Contributing Writer at Live with Heart & Soul, celebrates the success of real-life Christian women who are walking out God's calling on their lives. She also writes inspirational articles that draw our eyes back to the Creator.